Get in line for Mills

Brian Libby wrote this fine review on Wes Mills, who has two shows at the Portland Art Museum and PDX Contemporary Art

Get in line for Mills
By Brian Libby
The Oregonian
July 27, 2007

With an exhibit of new work this month at PDX Contemporary Art and a mini-survey at the Portland Art Museum on view until October, Wes Mills steps into a brighter spotlight than this thoughtful minimalist from Montana may be accustomed. But the attention reveals no mere shadow: The 40 works from these two shows communicate a consistent and quietly breathtaking talent.

Born in Tucson, Ariz., Mills, now 47, was raised mostly in the tiny Central Oregon high desert town of Kimberly; he now lives outside Missoula. His career has been on-again, off-again, but not frivolously.

While living in New York City during the 1980s, Mills abandoned making art. Since he took up drawing a second time, though, he has made up for lost time and focus, drawing more or less daily in what the artist describes as a meditative act. Art seems for Mills an all-or-nothing proposition, and that dedication comes through.

Mills' museum show was assembled by Jennifer Gately, the curator of Northwest art as part of the APEX series of exhibits on Northwest-based artists. It covers this later born-again period from the mid-1990s onward, omitting Mills' more text-oriented earlier works.

Although Mills makes some mixed-media pieces, drawings dominate both the PDX and PAM shows. They're almost all done on identical sheets of off-white paper, varying from 4-by-4 to 12-by-12 inches; all are square. The drawings are rendered with only graphite pencil and white pigment, sometimes applied and erased. PDX Contemporary owner Jane Beebe has aptly called Mills' work "the breath of a drawing."

In a pamphlet published as part of the museum exhibit, Mills explains his off-white paper and plain pencil marks are a deliberate but instinctive choice: "In order for the true qualities of black and white to reveal themselves, these two colors need to meet on neutral ground." That meeting, Mills notes, is not unlike the way an ancient Islamic color system called Haft Rang works; Mills has even named one of his works after that color system.

Although abnormally dark and heavily shaded compared with other works in the museum show, 1996's "The Bridge I Had Hope For" offers a mesmerizing depiction of a rectangular, almost skyscraper-like form in which the color black bleeds gently into lighter tints of gray, spread from Mills' hand with such delicacy that the image feels revealed more than created. Pioneering Swiss modernist architect Le Corbusier spoke of building forms being revealed in light; in Mills' drawings, they're brought to bear often with just a few dots or lines of graphite and pigment.

Many of the pieces in Mills' exhibit of new drawings at PDX Contemporary, such as "No Title #17" and "My Feelings About the First Drawing," consist of just a few geometric lines, sometimes intersecting but often in loose parallel. These are even more stripped-down versions of a similar work in the PAM show that's one of the artist's best: "Duchamp" from 1999. Here, a cluster of vertical but right-leaning lines seems to resemble everything from jagged mountain crags to a willow forest to a handful of uncooked spaghetti. At the same time, the cluster is bisected by a faint line that seems to suggest a world behind or beyond.

The title "Duchamp" might be misleading, however, for Mills' style is not usually referential or postmodern at all. Actually, there may be few artists working in such a minimal, abstract manner whose efforts seem so personal. Mills speaks of not only searching for authenticity in his work, but also a way to diagram that sensation with a few moves of the hand.

Still, despite their geometric quality, Mills' forms also strongly refer to or resemble natural forms. It is that tension and harmony --between the cleanly modern and minimal with the poetically organic --that makes these so-called hints of drawing able to roar in the mind.

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